To Resolve or Not To Resolve?

Okay.  Here it is the 5th of January, and I still haven't decided whether I'm making New Year's resolutions--or not.  So what is that about?


Maybe a pros and cons list will help me figure this out.  I have come up with the following positive thoughts about New Year's Resolutions--hereinafter referred to as NYRs.


NYR Pros
1.  I've (almost) always made them, so they're part of my tradition.
2.  NYRs give focus to my efforts to improve myself and my life.
3.  NYRs are useful conversation fodder at this time of year.
4.  If I manage to keep all or most--or what the heck! even some--of them, NYRs can strengthen my good opinion of myself.
5.  The exercise of considering and choosing NYRs makes for some pretty deep reflection.


All good, yes?  So why wouldn't I make like a polar bear and take the plunge?  What's not to love about NYRs?


NYR Cons
1.  I've (almost) always made them, so they're part of my tradition.  (Not so obviously a good thing.)
2.  NYRs can limit my focus, and concentrate my efforts too narrowly.
3.  As an NYR agnostic, I believe that my human mind is too small to know with certainty that NYRs have anything to do with outcomes, or with the quality of my life in the year ahead.
4.  If I manage to break all or most--or what the heck! even some--of them, NYRs can reinforce my low opinion of myself.
5.  The exercise of considering and choosing NYRs would require an amount of time and energy (given my perfectionism, which, come to think of it, maybe I should resolve to eliminate) that could be spent actually accomplishing something, resolved or not.


Clearly, neither list is exhaustive.  And since I have created two 5-item lists, I can't make my decision on a quantitative basis.  


As a fledgling Buddhist, I can see the attachment aspect of NYRs.  Not good.  But then I could resolve to let go of attachments. . . . But wouldn't that be basically becoming attached to the idea of non attachment?


Okay, now I'm getting a headache.


I have a provisional list of resolutions, just in case I decide to adopt any.  (Which makes me wonder who their original parents might have been, and why they decided to relinquish them.)


Revisiting last year's post on the subject of NYRs, I see that my quandary is not new.  Apparently, at least some things stay the same.  But what does that mean for the question at hand?  Resolve?  Don't resolve?


I resolve to think about it some more.

Life Management 101--Where Did All This Paper Come From?

Laura Stack's Find More Time:  How to Get Things Done at Home, Organize Your Life, and Feel Great About It is the current resource for Life Management 101 Tuesdays, as we make our way through her eight pillars of personal productivity.  This week, we examine Chapter 6, "Mastering the Sixth Pillar--PAPER."

Here, Stack provides insight and advice to those of us hip-deep in the dross of dead trees.  You know, the paper, paper and more paper that spills from countertops, obscures desk surfaces, fills our cars, and layers our lives.  As with each pillar, we begin our paper pushing with a 10-item quiz to diagnose the extent of our affliction.  (You can find the entire productivity quiz on Stack's website.)  I should not have been shocked that my score revealed a weakness in this area.  But really, I didn't realize my little problem was as bad as it is.  For each of the items below, I determined which of the following response categories was most descriptive:  1) to no extent; 2) to a little extent; 3) to some extent; 4) to a considerable extent; or 5) to a great extent.  My responses are in red.

To what extent do I . . . 

• Consistently purge my files without fear.  [1]
• Create and maintain a filing system that allows me to find papers easily.  [2]
• Follow a daily processing system for staying on top of the mail and paperwork.  [1]
• Handle bills in a timely fashion and keep up with recordkeeping.  [2]
• Know where to put every piece of paper I receive.  [1]
• Handle phone calls and voice mail productively.  [2]
• Use technology to reduce paper and complete tasks quickly.  [2]
• Keep insurance, medical documents, wills, and important papers up-to-date and easy to locate.  [2]
• Use a calendar system to track family members' schedules. [2]
• Organize and keep up with my reading.  [2]

Okay, so I'm drowning in paper.  But what can I do about it?  And is Laura Stack's approach likely to work for me?  

I'm beginning to think the answer is no, for the most part.  Her advice involves the kind of total life-revamp, relying on complicated systems and routines that I used to find appealing, and to devour regularly.  Until I foundered on the rocks of what sociologists call praxis--i.e., application or use of knowledge or skills.  

I can't use a tickler file, as Stack prescribes, because I can't care enough about adhering to it for longer than a few days.  I can't stay on top of my mail, or the notes from my meetings, because I am regularly interrupted by one crisis or another before I can complete the necessary ministrations, the sorting, discarding, delegating, execution and organization.  I can't maintain even the most basic filing system because I would rather watch a basketball game with my family than shuffle through records, warranty cards, and insurance policy updates.  

I admire people like Stack who can accomplish these things, and have enough control to sustain the necessary resolve and focus to keep it together.  But the combination of prescription and my perfectionism strengthen my desire to avoid such undertakings.  Or maybe I'm just too lazy.

I would love to get out from under all the paper, though.  What I need is a much lower maintenance design.  A little less fairy tale, a little more down and dirty.  I think I'll try to wade through the diabolical Health Insurance Pile, maybe an inch at a time; go through the drawer crammed with meeting notes, agendas, financial reports, etc.; and aim to get all the new junk mail thrown out each week.  Far from the order Ms. Stack details, but probably the best I can do at this point. 

Up next, Post--one of my less horrible pillars.  (Stack's usage of the term "post" reflects her military family's understanding, meaning one's assignment and set of responsibilities, inside and outside of the home.)  Six pillars down, two more to go.  

Too Fast, Too Furious

It is early evening, and I am just getting to this morning's blog post.  At the conclusion of this busy day "filled with surprises," a couple of the tectonic plates that make up my brain slide into contact.   Two recent occurrences work on each other and force a realization.  Like this.


Yesterday morning, I played host to the man who had put in my new furnace two or three years ago.  That young, and much-vaunted heating system had not been keeping up with the single digit temperatures of the last several days.  As it turned out, the problem was caused by my husband's having dislodged a brace which supported a section of PVC pipe attached to the furnace.  With the brace gone, the pipe's "pitch" was off, which caused water to accumulate in the pipe.  This led to the gurgling I had been hearing in the basement for months, and to the diminished heating capacity of the furnace.  It was not caused by the fact that I had failed to change the furnace filter even once in the two or three years since it was installed.  But it could have been.  This brings to mind a dire warning I had recently run across:  "Homeowner procrastination can ruin a house."


This morning, following an early meeting I had travelled to in a preconscious state, a colleague shared her astonishment at how slowly our collaborative was moving on elements of our overall strategy that had been decided upon months ago.  What was causing people not to follow through, not to produce?  I was not one of the people she was talking about.  Not this time.  I surmised that at least part of the regrettable delay had to do with the overload that collaborative involvement represented for all members.  


What do these two experiences have to do with each other?


The too much phenomenon.   Just as there is no room on the to-do lists of my collaborators in the transitional jobs undertaking, there is no room in my head for furnace filters.  Or for the amount of time and brain-power it would take to untangle the health bills morass created by our byzantine coverage, and compounded by the broke back financial condition of the state government that employs my professor husband.  


None of these cases, nor several others, involve procrastination, in the sense that I--or my colleagues--remember the responsibility in question, and have time to take care of it, but decide not to.  As our lives become more and more complicated, and more is expected of us, we are going to be dropping more and more balls.  I am reminded of the scenes of Charlie Chaplin's character in Modern Times as he struggled to keep up with a constantly speeded up assembly line, eventually falling behind and being sucked into the gears of the machine operating the conveyer belt.  


My realization:  I will never get "caught up."  It is not possible to do everything I have to do, much less all the things I want to do.  Something has to give.  It probably shouldn't be the furnace, or my children, or my health.  I hope it isn't my writing.  And at least the minimum must continue to be done to satisfy my employers.  But I will fail at something.  Maybe I should be deciding at what.  


And now I have run out of energy and day, but not out of things I should have done.  The backlog will be waiting for me in the morning.  And I fear the line will be going faster still.

Grappling with "O"

I'm starting to feeling like something's gaining on me again.  You know, that O-monster, OVERWHELM-MENT!  (I know it's not a word.)  And it seems I'm not the only one.


What is it about October?  In my family, there are a number of birthdays and anniversaries, in addition to Halloween hoopla, now with a new generation of masked marauders.  But the month seems traditionally to feature a noticeable uptick in meetings, events, campaigns, and preparations--maybe to get us in gear to go totally mad at "the holidays."  But could this annual mania actually be accellerating?  A friend of mine, never a layabout, told me recently that this is the busiest she can remember being in her life!  


I have been making a sincere effort to whittle, pare down, cut back and generally trim my list of obligatory tasks and projects.  But no sooner do I engage my recently developed "no" muscle than a patch of new demands crops up.  When I adhere to my resolution to take better care of myself, the result is that tasks are left over at the end of the day.  I dutifully move them to the next day, where they are joined by a fresh legion of to-dos.  


I definitely want to get off this ride.  


And where is all this stuff to do coming from, anyway?  It seems to bubble up from the ground beneath my feet, to slip through the cracks in my stone facade, to be carried like spores through the air around me.  It seeps in by email and Facebook posts, by text and voice messages on my cell and landline phones, by snail mail, and in almost every personal contact.  I can't leave a meeting or social engagement, it would appear, without trailing a host of things to see to.  Even church isn't safe.  And when my family members crawl out from their respective lairs--you guessed it!  More work for me.  "Mom, can you do me a favor?"  "Mary, did you take care of that thing we talked about?"  "Hey, Mary.  Can you look into getting Mom some life insurance?"  


Maybe I need to be more proactive about this whole thing.  Gear up for the task-off, assign lest I be assigned.  Or plug up the holes where all this accretion is getting in.  Lose the phones.  Quit checking the email.  Contract agoraphobia.  Or spray myself with some kind of work-repellant.  I imagine if I put my mind to it, I could figure this out.  


I know.  I'll put it on my list. . . . Or not.  

Honing My Tunnel Vision

Wikipedia defines tunnel vision this way:

Tunnel vision is the loss of peripheral vision with retention of central vision, resulting in a constricted circular tunnel-like field of vision.

^{Like it's a bad thing.}

^{Among the medical and biological causes listed for this affliction are:}

• Alcohol consumption 
• Hallucinogenic drugs
• Glaucoma
• Panic attack
• Severe cataracts, causing a removal of most of the field of vision
• Intense anger, due to the body being rapidly flooded with adrenaline and oxygen
• A bite from a Black Mamba and other snakes with the same strength venom

. . . and a whole host of other frightening conditions and circumstances.  The prudent author provides this caution:

When combined with piloting an aircraft, driving, crossing roads or operating heavy machinery, the consequences can be fatal.

For my purposes, however, I am most interested in the second of Merriam-Webster's definitions, particularly the last segment:

extreme narrowness of viewpoint : narrowmindedness; also: single-minded concentration on one objective 

As I move into my day with the trepidation that has become second nature recently, I am aware that the wide-angle lens that is my default provides too many hooks--what Buddhists call shenpa--to permit progress, let alone serenity.  I go into the kitchen to make my morning coffee, and I am greeted by my half-completed kitchen reclamation project.  I take up the New York Times puzzles that are supposed to stave off Alzheimer's, only to encounter a plethora of movie reviews that call me to cinematic retreat.  (And Friday is worse, because it involves hunting through two Arts sections to locate the elusive puzzles!)  I check my email and am reminded that I need to help save Senator Feingold, to renew my library books, to view my bills online, to send birthday greetings to my brother-in-law. . . . I wander into the bathroom and am greeted by the chaotic housekeeping of my sons.  Darn!  I forgot to raise them to be responsible citizens of a household.


And then there's my to-do list, growing like Topsy of late.  My husband intones, as he has been intoning for all the years that I've known him, that if I want to write, I have to do it first, and put it first.  He's right, I'm sure.  But then who's going to stock the fridge, clean up the dog barf, meet my work obligations, figure out why my car is making a throat-clearing noise, complete the shower repair that will get the kids to stop using our bathroom as they have been for the last few weeks, and . . .?  And when will I have time to finish reading the books I've started and the ones he's added to my pile?


My divergent thinking is getting me into trouble again, as is my ubiquitous respond-ability.  And the hooks of all my attachments.  So I aspire to tunnel vision, or maybe to the blindered state of horses in parade mode.  I had planned to spend part of yesterday devising a schedule, or as The Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell (on Spaghetti Sauce and Happiness) would have it, schedules that would allow for all my have-tos and my need-tos and really-really-want-tos.  But I had mistakenly calendared my birthday lunch with my sister for today, when it was really yesterday.  Luckily she called from the road to tell me she was running a bit late--since I would otherwise have been about 24 hours late for what turned out to be a really special occasion.  So the work I ran out on, and the scheduling retreat are rescheduled for today.  

Now if I can just find my blinders in the rubble that is my happy home, without tripping over too much shenpa on the way. . .

Heading Out

I was going to be done packing, and nagging my traveling companions to pack, yesterday.  Rrriiiight.


It's not like I haven't been busy.  Heck, I haven't even touched Bejeweled Blitz in days.  But I still haven't opened my suitcase.


I've been up to my ears in tasks and projects, as we prepare to leave.  But that's really the problem.  Or at least part of it.  Some part of my primitive brain responds to impending journeys as though I were saying goodbye to my life as I have known it, as though it were my last chance to set things right.  If I hold true to form, I will be dashing in from the last yoga class I can attend for 12 days; giving the kitchen a final once-over (as though my husband and my dog would be keeping it up in my absence!); throwing a few more last-minute items in my carry-on; completing nonessential work tasks; and being driven to the airport in a frazzled state, my energies spent before I board the plane at mid-day.  Since I have to get through two flights and a layover with a nervous teenager and his sibling in tow, this is probably not the condition I should be striving for.


Maybe my ancestors survived their transatlantic relocations by over-preparing.  Maybe their psyches were soothed in some endurance-promoting fashion by all the loose ends they tied up before departing.  But really, as much as I have to leave town, particularly in recent years,  can I afford the degree of intensity with which I approach embarkation?


The obvious answer is no.  Nor do I want to continue to be the kind of person that performs this comic ritual with regularity.  So today, I'm going to attempt to stop this runaway train, or at least to slow it down as it careens toward that all-too-familiar crash.  I'm going to try for good-enough packing, and let go of my perfectionistic goals and the tendency to continue adding "just one more thing" to my to-do-before-leaving list.  And I'm going to take some deep breaths and some rest breaks as I move through the next 27 hours, so that I can reach my destination without unraveling.


At least, that's the plan.

Romancing the Clock: In Search of Routine

What is it about routines?  For those of us who are largely self-directed workers, whether at home or in some designated workplace, the absence of routine can be daunting.  Personally, I have fond memories of mornings that began with packing lunches for myself and my kids, breakfasting, showering, dressing, assembling items needed for the day, and leaving the house at a predetermined time to travel to the elementary school where we would all spend the day.  And of days spent teaching college, when bells signaled me to begin and end class, and regularly scheduled meetings and office hours told me where to be and when.  


I am currently floundering in "freedom," not quite sure how to fit the puzzle pieces of my obligations and occupations into the frame of my waking hours.  I am spending too much time deciding what to do, and when to do it.  And in my present transitional emotional state, each decision is an opportunity for reflection and a ruminative, and often fruitless, search for meaning.  I need some structure.


Why, then, is it so difficult to use any one of the dozens of schemes I have learned about for giving form to my daily activities?  As with other resistances that plague me in my quest to get it together, I am partly in flight from myself.  In the past, my attempts to employ routine have been so overdone that I've conjured lists of tasks specified to the point of inanity.  For example, should I need to include a designated time for trimming my nails?  For petting my dog?  Apparently, I have a forest and trees issue.  Cutting to the chase, and staying focused on the big picture are not strengths for me.


Maybe it's all the multitasking I have been influenced to engage in.  Experts such as Dr. David Meyer warn that trying to do more than one thing at a time taxes our brains beyond their two-lobe capacity, decreases efficiency because of time lost in switching between tasks, diminishes focus and can impair short-term memory.  


In any case, I am motivated to try again.  I long for the comfort of some level of prearranged order in my day.  I want to make some decisions once, and not confront them again for awhile.  I crave a bit of predictability.


Here are three resources I have found that I intend to rely on as I construct a workable scaffolding. The first is an article entitled "Time Management Essentials: 13 Routines For Improving Your Life," on Freestyle Mind: Productivity and Life Hacks, which offers a daily, weekly, and monthly set of routines that are basic enough to avoid the nail-trimming, dog-petting trap.  The second is "Organize Your Day With Routines," a little pep talk on BellaOnline:  The Voice of Women, recommending the use of routines for transitional times of the day.  The third is "Daily Routines:  How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days."  It begins, intriguingly, with an interview with Simone de Beauvoir, which includes the question "When do you see Sartre?," and de Beauvoir's response, "Every evening and often at lunchtime. I generally work at his place in the afternoon."  This example should be helpful should I need to squeeze regular contact with a famous existentialist novelist into my overall agenda. 

I'll get back to you on what I manage to distill from these and other thoughts on the subject.  In the meantime, I have decided that for today--this being the last day my gym will be open until Saturday because of Rosh Hashana--I need to go swimming.  Right now.

Calendars, Calendars, Calendars

In my lifelong struggle to get and stay organized, calendars have played the part of useful ally, red herring, and saboteur.  

The first function is pretty straightforward.  When calendars do what they are supposed to do, they remind us of appointments.  They help us to avoid overlapping engagements.  They allow us to plan ahead, and to distribute our commitments sensibly.  They are our friends.

The red herring part comes in when I delude myself that the perfect calendar, and worse, the magical combination of several perfect calendars, will somehow cure my procrastination and allow me to achieve my dreams.  My father, had he known about my predilection for wandering through bookstores, office supply stores, and Target's office sections at all times of the year in pursuit of this quarry, would probably have diagnosed OCD.  There is certainly something obsessive about my quest.  

I continue to be drawn, despite years of disappointment, to the offerings of purse calendars, wall calendars, desk calendars and planners.  Color, size, arrangement of days and weeks, and "features" call out to me from the retailers' displays.  I stand as if mesmerized, picking up alternatives and comparing them, as if I were a calendar virgin.  As if someone somewhere might have "discovered" or "invented" my ideal solution since the last time I'd looked.  

I have spent too much time in this chimeric pursuit, time that might otherwise have been devoted to actually doing some of the things I intended to write in these instruments.  I have even been known to switch horses in midstream, changing calendars in September when a particular product seemed "more perfect" than the one I was already using.  And then, of course, obsessively (or is it compulsively?) copying entries from the soon-to-be-abandoned organizational tool into its replacement.  

But worse than this crazy tail-chasing behavior is what happens when I follow the advice of organizational gurus, who recommend keeping several calendars.  I currently have a purse calendar, which I consult when I am away from home and scheduling meetings or appointments; a planner/calendar, which contains my to-do lists and scheduled meetings and appointments; a wall calendar, on which I record my own meetings and appointments and those of other household members; and two computer-based calendars, one personal and one for the organization I help to manage.   My personal computer-based calendar reproduces a daily agenda on my home page, which should theoretically get me where I need to go by putting it in my face each time I open my laptop.  I have decided not to keep a calendar on my cell phone, partly because of its wayward habits of disappearing and running out of charge.

Of course, the gurus would have me synchronize all these calendars.  And that's the crux of my difficulty.  My failure to routinely copy entries from one to the rest of my calendars is what gets me in trouble, producing the third role--calendars as agents saboteur.  I rely on calendars to reality-test my hazy notion of where and when I should be, and behave as if each calendar holds all the necessary information.  This is hardly ever the case.  So when I check the calendar at hand, I am effectively playing calendar roulette.   This week, the game cost me $50 when I missed an appointment and was assessed the no-show fee.  On a good day, my spotty system might relieve me of attending a meeting I wasn't too keen on anyway.

Today, my purse calendar tells me that I am out of time for completing this post, and need to rush out the door to make a late breakfast with a friend, recently and involuntarily disemployed from his job of 31 years.  I leave for tomorrow the task of figuring out what to do about all my calendars.  But I won't stop at Office Depot on my way back.  

Freedom--It's Gaining on Me!

I never really got around to reading Erich Fromm's 1941 classic Escape from Freedom--which was interestingly published in England under the title Fear of Freedom.  But I do own the book, and I have read several synopses, so that should count for. . .not so much, probably.  


In any case, I find his premise compelling.  Powell's Books sums it up this way:

If humanity cannot live with the dangers and responsibilities inherent in freedom, it will probably turn to authoritarianism. 

Fromm, according to people who have read the book, wrote of the anxiety and emptiness many of us experience in the absence of imposed controls.  Been there, felt that.   And he distinguished between "freedom from" (bad) and "freedom to" (good), which are, in essence, the horns of the dilemma I have been straddling for a good chunk of my adult life.


For many reasons, some profound and most serendipitous, I have existed largely outside the formal labor market for most of my "working" life.  This is not to say that I haven't worked, and even held jobs from time to time.  But in and out of formal paid employment, I have "enjoyed" a great deal of freedom.  I have had jobs that involved setting my own schedule, determining my own assignments, and traveling over fairly large geographic areas.  Jobs with night and weekend hours which were "comped" into hours off.   And this explains why I was reading Alan Lakein's How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life all those years ago.


The latitude to decide what I'm going to do, and when I'm going to do it, has been a benediction and a scourge.  Rita Emmett, in The Procrastinator's Handbook, writes of the dangers of drift, the subject of Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project video this week, and particularly troublesome for those of us in relatively unstructured work situations.  Researchers tell us that our overtaxed brains are buckling under the weight of too many choices and "decision fatigue." Pursued by freedom, I am tempted, as Erich Fromm warned, to flee into the waiting arms of authoritarianism. Maybe I should "get a job." Or maybe I should approach my life like a job. Create routine. Generate lists. Boss myself around.


Of course, Erich Fromm would have me brave the storms of cowardice.  Turn and face the opportunities in my freedom.  Use that "freedom to" connect with the world I find myself in, and join my creative effort to the project of improvement.  Theoretically, this way of experiencing freedom would assuage my anxiety, replace the emptiness with purpose, and avoid the need for arbitrary structure.  


At the end of all this reflecting, I am left with my choices.  I still have to figure out what to do today, and where to begin.  (My dog just volunteered to take this decision from me.  He knows what I should do first.)

Fun with Post-its

In 1977, 3M launched the Post-it.  That same year, I launched my first child, and my 34-year stint as a mother of minor children.  Coincidence?  Maybe.  But as motherhood has made its inevitable inroads into my short-term memory, the proliferation of these handy little brain cell substitutes has kept pace.  


Over the years, our product options have expanded to include a dizzying selection of colors, sizes, shapes and functions beyond the now-pedestrian square yellow tacky original.  It is now possible to store one's thoughts on a green apple-shaped note, to tab one's file with a magenta arrow, and to nag one's child with an initial-shaped missive.  (Is "Clean Your Room!" better received, and/or likelier to happen, if delivered in purple ink on a periwinkle letter Z than in the more traditional maternal shriek?)  And there are special Post-it To Do list pads, and shopping lists.  Specialty notes with catchy phrases abound, as well.  In my collection are notes screaming SEX! in big red type, with "Now that I've got your attention" in quieter print below; soft gray notes proclaiming that "Writers have the last word;" and "If it weren't for the last minute, nothing would ever get done," clearly the procrastinator's choice.


The image above is a photo of my current computer desktop, awash in electronic post-its, courtesy of the Stickies application for Mac.  Along the left-hand side of the picture are arrayed alphabetized notes, color-coded by life area--green for my older teen, pink for his younger sibling, light blue for the nonprofit organization which takes up half my weeks, gray for this blog, deeper blue for personal, and yellow for everything else.  Unlike the non-virtual version, these digital notes never lose their grip and slip mercifully into oblivion.  As you can see, I now need to devote some time to clearing these reminders.  I am similarly in need of unclogging my actual short-term memory.  I am giving way too much conscious RAM to way too many trivial compunctions these days.  Maybe that's why I can barely hold a thought long enough to transfer it to one form of Post-it or another.  Or remember where I put the Post-it!


Like a lot of things we invent to simplify our lives, the helpful Post-it can lend itself to abuse.  If we are prone to overcomplicating, we need to guard against our tendency to co-opt even the simplest item into our crazy schemes to overrun our lives with chaos.  I, for one, am overdue for a Post-it purge, and a stricter diet.  While I tackle that, we can all amuse ourselves with this dazzling display of Post-it creativity, using connected Pop-up notes.  But beware the temptation to follow the You Tube fairy and get lost in the amazing garden of post-it art and pranks!